Imagine being told that you could not play basketball or netball because you were too tall. There would be an outrage from parents and sports fans the world over that a person should be penalised simply because they have grown taller than their peers.
Anyone who follows sport will know that South African middle distance runner Caster Semenya has been dogged by controversy as a result of having naturally high testosterone levels.
She has undergone more tests and closer scrutiny that almost any other athlete. In 2009 following her Gold medal performance in the 800m at the World Championships the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) asked her to take a sex verification test to ascertain whether she was female. The IAAF said at the time that it was “obliged to investigate” after she had made a personal improvement in her performance by 25 seconds at 1500 m and eight seconds at 800 m. They claimed that these performances were “the sort of dramatic breakthroughs that usually arouse suspicion of drug use.”
The sex test results were never published officially. Unfortunately for Semenya some results were leaked to the press and were widely discussed. Amongst these were claims of Semenya having “an intersex trait.”
In recent times the IAAF have been seeking to force so-called “hyperandrogenic” athletes or athletes with “differences of sexual development” to seek treatment to lower their levels of testosterone to below a prescribed level if they wish to compete.
Semenya who has been proven to have naturally elevated levels of Testosterone has taken her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport claiming that this abnormality is not enough to make her a World Class athlete.
Testosterone is known to boost muscle strength and bone mass.
The argument put forward by Cara Tannenbaum, Scientific Director of the institute of Gender and Health at the Canadian Institutes of Health and research who backed Semenya was as follows:
“To become a great athlete requires at least 10,000 hours of training, focus, discipline, timing, coaching, equipment and strategy, ” she said. “If we exclude women who have high testosterone levels from track events will we then decide to exclude men who are extraordinarily tall from playing basketball?”
“It would be unscientific to make decisions on exclusion for men or women based on a single genetic factor alone.”
A decision on whether to accept a ruling wherein Testosterone levels in women athletes were capped at five nano moles per litre of blood has been delayed. It was due to be made at the end of April. However, since the hearing in February the IAAF and those fighting for Semenya and other athletes with natural differences have both submitted additional information to the Court. No set date has been given as to when a ruling will be made.
Whereas higher levels of Testosterone maybe be seen as an advantage as Ms Tannenbaum states that alone would not be enough for an athlete to walk onto the track and suddenly start winning.
Having been under so much scrutiny throughout her career and suffered suspensions from competition, credit should be given to Semenya for the way that she has conducted herself. She has never gone seeking the attention that her difference has brought her.
Yet at times she is seen as a beacon for others who are genetically different. In 2010, the British magazine the New Statesman included Semenya in its annual list of “50 People That Matter.” Her inclusion was recorded as being for “unintentionally instigating an international and often ill-tempered debate on gender politics, feminism, and race, becoming an inspiration to gender campaigners around the world”
One wonders who is driving this push from IAAF, and what are the motives behind it. If they are successful in penalising people who are naturally different where will it end? Will there be minimal height restrictions for gymnasts, maximum height restrictions for basketballers? Will shot putters only be allowed to compete if their hand is a certain size?
The issue raised its head publicly back in 2015 when this controversial IAAF policy on hyperandrogenism, – high natural levels of testosterone – in women, was suspended following the case of Dutee Chand v. Athletics Federation of India (AFI) & The International Association of Athletics Federations, also in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Note that there is no such ruling when it comes to men, however testosterone levels in men also vary.
The ruling in 2015 found that there was a lack of evidence provided to the Court of Arbitration for Sport that testosterone increased female athletic performance. At the time the CAS notified the IAAF that it had two years to provide the evidence that it did.
Was such evidence provided within two years? If it was it is very hard to find any proof that it was.
Yet in April 2018, the IAAF pushed ahead and announced new rules that required hyperandrogenous athletes to take medication to lower their testosterone levels, effective beginning in November 2018. The ruling that Caster Semenya is challenging.
There are many that believe that this ruling has been created to eliminate Semenya from dominating the women’s 800m and 1500m.
She would not be alone. The world record in the women’s 800m which was set in 1983 still stands. The Czech runner Jarmila Kratochvilova who was so dominant also suffered doping and gender accusations. None of which the IAAF and their doping agencies could confirm.
This is an extremely complex issue. To show just how complex a post-competition study was carried out in 2014 by a number of eminent endocrinologists and was published in a report entitled “Endocrine profiles in 693 elite athletes in the postcompetition setting.”
These scientists found that of the 693 elite athletes tested “16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes.” Which tends to prove that the IAAF is heading down a very dangerous path, one that appears to be extremely discriminatory.
Just to make things more complicated, again in 2015, the International Olympic Committee ruled in regards to transgender athletes, that transgender athletes cannot be excluded from an opportunity to participate in sporting competition. However they may have created the problem when they stated that Transgender athletes who identified themselves as female would be allowed to compete in that category as long as their testosterone levels were below 10 nanomoles per litre for at least 12 months prior to the competition. There would be no restrictions on transgender athletes identifying themselves as male and competing in that category. The IOC went on to state that requiring surgical anatomical changes as a requirement for participation may be considered as a violation of notions of human rights.
Hopefully for the sake of all who happen to be slightly different genetically, the Court of Arbitration for Sport rules in favour of the athletes. As just like every generation or two a special player, like Pele or Maradona, Bradman or Viv Richards comes along, so too athletes who train just as hard as their fellow competitors, but nature has seen to given them something different in order to be that little bit special.
